Tuesday, December 3, 2013

George Biggs’s Family Herald

Family Herald, May 5, 1860

‘…the great thing is to serve up hot. My immortal tale referred to above opened with a wedding ceremony, which was interrupted at the critical moment by an eclipse (“My readers will remember the terrible eclipse of 18–,” &c.) When the darkness had passed, the bride had disappeared!’

PREFACING his collected numbers of Pickwick Charles Dickens said of serial
writing, “that, while the different incidents were linked together by a chain
of interest strong enough to prevent their appearing unconnected or impossible,
the general design should be so simple as to sustain no injury from his
detached and desultory form of publication, extending over no fewer than twenty
months.” Adding “every number should be, to a certain extent, complete in
itself.”

AWRITER on ‘Social Economy’ in 1862 in The British Controversialist listed
the “products of the infidel press,” these “periodicals of a positively
pernicious character” as

…such serials as The London
Journal, Family Herald, Reynolds’s Miscellany, The Welcome Guest, The Guide,
The Home Magazine, The Halfpenny Gazette, and the Halfpenny Journal. The Family
Herald, The London Journal, and Reynolds’s Miscellany, are the elder members of
this fraternity; and the numbers reported to be sold of them appears almost
fabulous; but there are many facts which prove their immense success and
popularity. Take the following by way of example. In the newspaper notices of
the somewhat recent death of Mr. James Biggs, the projector and proprietor of
the Family Herald, it was stated that he had realized a very handsome fortune
by that periodical, which in his hands attained a circulation of 260,000 copies
weekly!

OLDEST of the ‘serials’ — subtitled: ‘A Domestic Magazine of Useful Information and Amusement’ — the Family Herald was first published from 421,
Strand, London, on May 13, 1843. Mr. George Biggs (not James) was the proprietor. The
Rev. James Elishama “Shepherd” Smith (1801-1857), a contributor to Benjamin Cousins's Penny Satirist, was the first editor. When George Biggs
died on May 22, 1859, the Family Herald was continued under proprietor William Stevens,
one of the founders of the Reader. The Family Herald lasted until 1940. Scottish novelist Margaret Oliphant reviewed sixpence worth of the popular
penny periodicals of 1858. She wrote of the Family Herald

The Family Herald is blandly
narrative and storytelling, with a mixture of the fine, the thrilling, and, for
a wonder, the domestic.

Publisher’s Circular, 1844

GEORGE BIGGS began as a compositor for the printer Galignani, and it was
there, according to the Literary Gazette, he saved the money to publish the
Family Herald — “a species of publication quite new to the public when Mr. Biggs
venture first saw the light.” In 1843 “all the capital required was sufficient
capital to pay for printing and paper. It must be said of the Family Herald that it is the purest reading of all purely amusing penny literature; it is, indeed, a family paper.” The Family Herald had no illustrations
and, other than the occasional initials, the writers remained anonymous. ‘Weekly
Romance,’ an article in the Saturday Review, May 8, 1856, described the serial paper
as a weekly giving

…at the small cost of a
penny, column on column of spirited romance. The stories are not indeed specimens
of very high art, and it is difficult to mistake the class for whom they are
especially written. They are obviously meant to find their way into the kitchen;
and if mistresses want to know what are the evening studies of their cooks and
housemaids, they have only to devote a few minutes to turning over the
fascinating pages in question.

WITHOUT heirs or next of kin, George Biggs died leaving an estate of £70,000,
a fortune in the 1850s. One of his executors was Benjamin Davy Cousins of Helmet-court,
Strand, printer of the Family Herald, who was also left £7000 in Biggs’s will. Biggs
left over 150 bequests; among them were assistants, printers, contributors to
the Family Herald, and his “predecessor” Mr. Leigh. Many an aged printer or
printer’s widow had Biggs’s Printer’s Almshouse Society to thank for pensions of
£10 per annum, payable half-yearly.

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Cartoonist, illustrator, storyteller, born in Nelson, B.C. in May 1950, has contributed to Chronicle, Weirdom, and Visions fanzines. John illustrated ‘Ronald and the Dragon’ by Lawrie Peters in 1975. Email: adcock34@gmail.com